“Now, my children,” said Marguerite, highly elated at her absurd title of Matron, “you are in my care, and I must look after you. Why, where are Nan and Helen?”
Sure enough, only six of the girls were to be seen; but just at that moment the two missing ones were escorted through the now wabbling doorway by an official. They were rather red-faced, and explained that they had seated themselves in the smoking-car by mistake, and the brakeman had kindly brought them back to their friends.
“I am shocked,” said Marguerite, severely. “Sit down there at once, and after this follow my directions more closely.”
Then the eight girls were quickly paired off, and the general chatter was broken up into dialogues.
Mindful of her position as Matron, Marguerite kept a watchful eye on her charges. To be sure, the watchful eye was so bright and merry that as a means of restraint it was practically useless. But the Blue Ribbon Cooking Club knew how to behave itself in a public conveyance—oh, dear, yes! and, save for a few sudden and really unavoidable bursts of merriment, it was as proper and decorous a rosebud garland of girls as one could wish to see.
To be sure, there was some commotion when the conductor asked for Marguerite’s ticket, and she suddenly remembered she had written Aunt Annie’s soup recipe on the back of it, intending to copy it before the conductor came around.
“It was the only bit of paper I had,” she explained, “and it is such a good recipe. What shall I do?”
Nan had a blank-book with her which she always carried in case of poetic fire, and the conductor obligingly left the soup-ticket, as Betty called it, for them to copy, and returned later to receive the yellow card, much crumpled by the process of erasure. But the precious recipe was safe, and at least one page of Nan’s book was worth having.
And there was another mild excitement when Nan’s cuckoo-clock, which was carefully laid away up in the rack, suddenly announced in shrill pipes that it was twelve o’clock. It wasn’t twelve o’clock at all, and that rascally cuckoo knew it; but having been silenced by Nan’s breathless run down to the station, he was well pleased to be set going again by the jar of the train, and he chirped his twelve double notes with an evident enjoyment of the situation.